Cards Against Humanity’s Gifts Actually Rekindling Our Holiday Spirit

Back in November, I wrote about Cards Against Humanity’s 12 Days of Holiday Bullshit. The basic deal seemed simple enough: 100,000 people pay CAH $12 and fill out a silly form about what they want for Christmas, and in return, CAH sends them a gift a day for 12 days.

The first gifts were pretty straightforward fun: a tiny bag of coal, a few packs of holiday-themed CAH cards. Then, they started to get fancier: posters. A new card game. A printed “funny pages” zine, with new comic strips commissioned from the likes of Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half), Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), and Nicholas Gurewitch (Perry Bible Fellowship). (Whether or not you subscribed, you can track the remaining days of Holiday Bullshit — and get free downloadable versions of many previous gifts — at HolidayBullshit.com.)

And then I got an email from a woman named Liz, who wrote, “Last night I received a package which contained exactly what I asked for in their Holiday Bullshit registration form- a Lord of the Rings Two Tower Deck Building Game! I had only told two other people I wanted it and I knew they hadn’t done it.” The gift was signed “From Santa CAH.” Another subscriber, who’d asked for “One of those cool city Transformers from the 80’s,” got a two-foot-tall Transformers Metroplex figure. There’s no word yet on whether everyone’s getting their wish granted — or, if so, how CAH will handle less practically minded wishes.

But the best gift so far came today, when CAH announced that it had used a day’s worth of dollars to fund projects in high-poverty classrooms across the country, via the online charity DonorsChoose.org. In a detailed infographic that’s half information, half an impassioned argument for charitable giving, they broke down where those donations will go–and, because they are still Cards Against Humanity, how many Bengal tigers the 38,318 children who will benefit from those donations could feed over the course of a year (952, for the curious).

This isn’t the first time CAH has funneled holiday cash into philanthropy. In 2012, they donated all of the profits of their pay-what-you-want holiday packs, some $70,000, to the Wikimedia Foundation. After this year, the self-proclaimed “party game for horrible people” may need to find itself a new tagline.